ADDRESS. 9 



It is at the same time instructive and amusing to look back on the 

 discussions of those days. While one class of objectors accounted for the 

 configuration of the flint implements from the gravels by some unknown 

 chemical agency, by the violent and continued gyratory action of water, 

 by fracture resulting from pressure, by rapid cooling when hot or by rapid 

 heating when cold, or even regarded them as aberrant forms of fossil 

 fishes, there were others who, when compelled to acknowledge that the 

 implements were the work of men's hands, attempted to impugn and set 

 aside the evidence as to the circumstances under which they had been 

 discovered. In doing this they adopted the view that the worked flints 

 had eLther been introduced into the containing beds at a comparatively 

 recent date, or if they actually formed constituent parts of the gravel then 

 that this was a mere modern alluvium resulting from floods at no very 

 remote period. 



In the course of a few years the main stream of scientific thought left 

 this controversy behind, though a tendency to cut down the lapse of time 

 necessary for all the changes that have taken place in the configuration of 

 the surface of the earth and in the character of its occupants since the 

 time of the Palaeolithic gravels, still survives in the inmost recesses of the 

 hearts of not a few observers. 



In his Address to this Association at the Bath meeting of 1864, Sir 

 Charles Lyell struck so true a note that I am tempted to reproduce the 

 paragraph to which I refer : — 



' When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the 

 glacial and post-glacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to 

 take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monu- 

 ments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order 

 to abridge the number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, 

 a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in pre- 

 historic times by investing the causes which have modified the animate 

 and inanimate world with extraordinary and excessive energy. It is 

 related of a great Irish orator of our day that when he was about to 

 contribute somewhat parsimoniously towards a piiblic charity, he was 

 persuaded by a friend to make a more libei-al donation. In doing so he 

 apologized for his first apparent want of generosity by saying that his 

 early life had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and that "they 

 who are born to affluence cannot easily imagine how long a time it takes 

 to get the chill of poverty out of one's bones." In like manner we of the 

 living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of 

 centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modem 

 period, shrink naturally at first from making wliat seems so lavish an 

 expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been 

 accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronology of 

 the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by 

 old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is convinced, and we 



